Tuesday, April 17, 2012

I have now been a professional software developer for 25 years. My first software development job was only part-time software development. I wrote and improved an application written using dBase III for DOS, at a surplus-electronics and surplus-military-gear (think parachutes, and backpacks, and camping gear, not weapons) store in my hometown. As an aside, it was the coolest job I've ever had, in addition to being the most poorly paid.
As a software job it lacked most of what professionals would consider "minimum standards" these days; The product had to be functional at all times, and there was no such thing as "release management". We were working on a live production system, at all times. The version control system was called "making a backup", and involved keeping around enough backup copies of the database image, on floppy disk, which included both the data and the code. There were no code reviews, there were no unit tests, there was no bug tracking database, and there were no development team meetings. For simpler single developer projects in a small non-networked application for DOS, it worked fine. But what happened between 1984 and 1994 is that the software development world fell apart, over and over again, and each time, something new was supposed to save it. Object oriented programming will save us. Blobbygrams (OOA/OOD) will save us. Metaprogramming will save us. Patterns will save us. Formal methodologies will save us. Each of these software tools has its place, or had a place at some time, but nothing has ever been a panacea.

Figure 1: dBase for DOS: Documentation and installation floppy disks

Why do we have so much procedure and process now, and so many tools that we never needed or didn't know we needed, back in the 1980s? Because we can't just fly by the seat of our pants. At a certain level of complexity, ad hoc approaches stop working at all, and lead to almost certain project failure.

Software projects often fail, even when there is a formal process, and the reason we most often pinpoint is that projects are "out of control", and that even though many or most people on the project know that the process is out of control, they can't agree on how to bring it back under control.

I love version control systems, because they are time-machines for code. And they are a part of keeping a software process under control, and knowing what code went to what customer, in what version of your project. And they're great. You should never work without one. One of the other things that version control was supposed to do was prevent things from changing that we want to keep frozen. Some version control systems even require you to "check out files" before you can work on them, and that "check out" action changes the files from "read only" to editable. (Visual Source Safe, and Perforce, are the two most commonly encountered version control systems that require you to first get a read only copy of the whole file set, then execute a "check out" command to make the individual source files writable before you can edit a file.) Part of the reason for that "read only" flag was that in the early days version control systems lacked real merge capabilities, or that merging was difficult, perhaps considered "risky" or "scary". Most projects that I have worked on, try to achieve such a "frozen" state or 'stable branch' for all major projects. Stability is part of a project being under control.

The other half of a project being under control, paradoxically, seems to be that everybody wants to keep cramming features into the product. This schizophrenia (stable, yet with new features) seems to be the proximal cause of projects going out of control, in my experience. Rapid uncontrolled progress on a project leads to one kind of diagnosis of project failure (it's unstable, and unusable) and yet, that rarely happens anymore at most places, projects are seen to be out of control for the reverse reason; Nobody can explain or justify how slow the progress on new features is going.

The most successful software projects I have ever worked on, and all of my favorite jobs, have had one thing in common; the projects that I worked on were "under control", that is, bad stuff was minimized, but also, expectations of developer productivity were reasonably in sync with what was realistically possible.

My best-ever bosses have all been people who knew what a PID loop was, and most of them could even tune one if they were asked to. A PID loop has at least one sensor-input that reads something from the real world, like temperature, or RPM, or air pressure, or perhaps a virtual input such as a price of a stock on the NYSE. It then has an output, which is something which can hopefully be used to affect the thing we're trying to control. If the input was a temperature sensor, measuring the temperature of a liquid, the output might be a relay on/off control attached to a heater, or it might be a variable output controlling a valve, which can change the pressure or flow of a gas or liquid, or perhaps the output might be the commands to a stock-market-buying-and-selling system. What a PID loop does is take three coefficient terms in an equation, a Proportional term, an Integral Term, and a Derivative term, and use those coefficients to do realtime control of a process. When a process is "under control" it behaves in a predictable way, even when it's disturbed. If the sun came in the window, and heated up the liquid that we're trying to control, a PID controller would handle that disturbance, if tuned properly and the process would not be out of control.

Software processes are not as simple to control as "one single input", but they do respond to logical analysis, and this logical analysis is conducted at a glacial pace. Once or twice within 20 years, someone comes up with something like the "SDLC" or "Waterfall" or "Scrum" or "Agile" approach to software development. These are promoted as a software panacea. Inevitably, certifications and formal processes take over informal insights into project management, and turn whatever good ideas were at the core of these software development "control" practices, and take all the effectiveness, and certainly, all of the fun, out of being a software professional. It's particularly sad to see "Agile" and "Scrum" get twisted, since the original ideal behind "Scrum" was exactly the insight that software processes are not universally equal and that practices that work in one context might not be workable in other contexts. So, while "Scrum" should have been resistant to such perverse misuse, It has been widely noted that what killed Waterfall could kill Agile, and scrum.

So given all that, you'd think that I would argue that developer should just be left alone to do what they do, and take as long as they're going to take, and all that. That would be a spoiled, unreasonable, and ultimately self-destructive viewpoint. The best projects I have worked with, and the best managers I have ever worked for, did not give developers enough autonomy that they could derail a business plan, and imperil a company's future. That would have been rediculous. But what they did do, was figure out what sorts of controls, and measurements of the software process were effective, and apply at least those methods and measurements that could be shown to be useful. They were agile without using the word agile. They didn't have code reviews. They didn't have scrums. But they had something which is perhaps the foundational principle behind Scrum:

Managers, stakeholders, and developers, co-operated, and worked together. Developers were respected, but not allowed to run the show. Managers were technically competent, and understood business requirements, and could ascertain whether or not developers were effective, and were making sufficient headway. Nobody got together for daily standup meetings and said "I'm blocked" or "No blockers", as if that would help. But when a developer needed a tool, he would go to his boss, and he'd get questions, intelligent ones about whether it was needed or not, and if the need seemed real, he would get his tool bought. When a developer was not making good progress, the approach was to see what could be done, pragmatically, to get something done, at a reasonable time, even if it wasn't the full spec that everybody would have dreamed off. That kind of rational change of scope, and attempt to protect project milestones, was as effective (whether we call it timeboxing, or sprints, or milestones) as it could have been, given that what really often held us back, and delayed projects, was the same thing that always delays projects; Inexact, incomplete, incoherent, mutually contradictory or vague requirements, due to a lack of real understanding of the underlying business requirements, or a misunderstanding about the real useful nature of the software product.

Pragmatism should be the primary value in every development organization,and on every project. Pragmatism stays focused on business. The business of writing software. It doesn't go down blind alleys, it doesn't play blame games, and it doesn't wonder about water that's gone under the bridge, but it sticks to the question; What do we do now, what do we do next, and how do we prevent issues that have affected our ability to do great work from hurting us all again? Pragmatism takes collective responsibility for success, and doesn't blame individuals. It doesn't play political games, and it doesn't stab people in the back. Pragmatic professional software development is not a buzzword, or an approach that replaces human judgement. In fact it relies on human judgement, and only works when you're sane, sensible, and centered in reality. It's just recognizing that there's a lot of superstition and magical thinking out there in the software development world, that needs to be replaced with careful, rational, friendly, collegial, scientific realism.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Jack Tramiel, died this past Sunday. A Jewish man of Polish descent, survived the Nazi-holocaust including being imprisoned in a concentration camp, and went on to become one of the most important figures in the microcomputer revolution that is still changing the world.
After the war, he lived in the US, and briefly in Canada. He started Commodore in Toronto, Canada (where I live right now) in 1955. Commodore Business Machines made calculators, typewriters, filing cabinets, and other office equipment, until the day they purchased MOS, a semiconductor company that made the 8-bit 6502 processor.
Commodore/MOS's first microcomputer product was not even a "complete computer system". The KIM-1 was a single-board that needed a power supply, and some additional circuitry added, not to mention a case, and some kind of display or terminal. Then, Jack brought us the Commodore PET, which was a ground-breaking computer. Early Commodore PET hobbyists were among the first in the home computer craze. The Commodore PET had a black-and-white display, and depending on the model, either a 40 column screen or an 80 column text screen. The PET did not have any kind of "bit map" graphics capability, unless you count the creative use of character shapes in the "PETSCII" custom ASCII-like character set.
The Vic-20 was the first computer to sell in mass-market quantities, that could be attached to a color TV set. With only 22 columns across on the screen, I didn't really much like the Vic-20. Here's a screen-shot of a BASIC program on a Vic-20 emulator that gives you an idea of how limited a 22 column screen might feel:

The next computer was the Commodore 64, the most important computer in the 1980s, in my opinion, because it was the first computer I ever owned. Okay, it's still the best selling computer of all time. I had played around with Atari 400/800 XL computers, the Vic-20 and the PET, the TRS-80, and the Apple II. But no other machine in 1982 could touch the Commodore 64. It had amazing sound capabilities, graphic capabilities including bitmapped graphics and sprites much more advanced than early IBM PC XT and IBM PC AT computers. It could be used with a TV, but a lot of people bought the Commodore 1702 monitor. Very few people ever purchased hard drives for their Commodore 64s, but almost all US/Canadian owners of Commodore 64 bought the 1541 Disk Drive, which stored 170K on a 5.25" floppy disk.
I wish I had a picture of me on my commodore 64, but here is a picture of a system much like the one I spent thousands of hours learning to program, playing games, and using Bulletin Board Systems, which we did a lot of the same things with that you might use the Internet to do today:

Jack Tramiel, and his employees, at Commodore brought a computer to the masses. After leaving Commodore, Jack purchased the personal-systems division of Atari, and masterminded the Atari ST, another amazing computer that was years ahead of its time, and which had a loyal following of its own. My uncle had an Atari ST, and it was a beautiful machine. But no computer has ever been as amazing to me as the Commodore 64. My first "geek love".
Thank you Jack. You changed my life. You changed the world. Writing programs on my commodore 64, I felt like I was doing magic. I still feel the same way about coding. When you build something on a computer, you're not just creating a work of art, you're making a little virtual machine, that can seem to have a life of its own. It could be something beautiful and elegant as a wristwatch, a space shuttle, an autonomous robot, or a jetfighter, that lives in a little virtual world called 'your computer'. Even leaving aside the early attempts at "Artificial intelligence" in the 1980s, like "Eliza", writing games was like being the creator of your own tiny universe. You wrote the rules. Watching all the rules turn into a working game felt like you were in control of a tiny universe.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The year that Delphi 1.0 was released, my main desktop computer at home, and my computer at work, were both running IBM OS/2 Warp, an operating system that is now 25 years old.
I was employed in 1995 to write software for a large insurance company that had invested heavily in IBM OS/2 Warp, using Visual Age C++, a now dead compiler, IDE and tool set. We wrote scripts and tools in a language called Rexx.
Rexx was a language that was intended to become what Python, Perl, and Ruby later became; Very expressive, dynamic high level languages, but Rexx was not concerned with doing so in any kind of object-oriented way.
OS/2 had a lot of interesting aspects. The desktop environment had a system-level object model much like the Microsoft COM (OLE Automation) model, and it was called the System Object Model (SOM). The desktop was entirely composed of persistent objects which made them much more interesting than the desktop-icon-shortcuts on your windows desktop.
Microsoft is often accused of merely buying technology rather than building it from scratch, since DOS, their first big product other than the ROM-basic that came in early 8-bit computers, was actually acquired from a company called Seattle Computer Products. OS/2 on the other hand, was mostly a home-grown project, jointly developed in its earliest days, by both Microsoft and IBM. An early disagreement about the graphical user interface (presentation manager, written by IBM, versus the Windows codebase and APIs, written of course by Microsoft) lead to a "divorce" between Microsoft and IBM, and IBM took over OS/2 development, and marketing, and subsequently (and rather famously) killed it completely.
Around the same time, IBM did a lot of other creative things, or rather, bought them from other people, and renamed them, and then failed to market them, and killed them completely. One of those clever things was Visual Age SMALLTALK, which is still alive as "VA Smalltalk" sold by Instantiations, Inc. Some of the original IBM smalltalk people (who came to IBM along with visual age itself) are still working on the product, which is an obscure but beautiful little thing. I played around with Smalltalk, but instead of using their lean fast "Rapid application development" I was building using the IBM VA C++ class libraries, which were (like many IBM products) good in theory, and rubbish in real world use. They had adapted a visual-programming system that actually involved "wiring up integrated-circuit-like components", in some really interesting precursor to "dependency injection" and modern OOP. The problem was, that the system was useless in practice. You couldn't use it to build anything more complicated than a HelloWorld demo without it turning into crap. The company I was working for folded up shop. The insurance company client kept its IBM OS/400 based solutions around for a few more years, until they were eventually scrapped, and they moved to a Windows based desktop like everybody else. At one point, the PC world was IBMs to lose, and now that they're insignificant players in the software market, and have exited the PC hardware market completely, I'm almost sad for them. Almost. Because they were so brilliant in some ways, and so inept in other ways. OS/2 was brilliant except when it made me want to tear my hair out, scream, rant, swear, and fuss. I was an OS/2 fan, except when I was an OS/2 hater. It was a pre-emptively multitasking protected mode operating system, and I ran a bulletin board system on it for years. It was a thing of beauty, in its time. A year ago I decided to get a VirtualBox VM working with OS/2 on it. Fun stuff. But I was reminded how very long ago it was. 16 color VGA at 640x480 was the default desktop screen resolution. No PPP or TCP/IP+DHCP out of the box in OS/2 Warp until 4.0. Not much support for any hardware not manufactured by IBM, any date after 1997. Sad really.
Once I learned to use Linux/Unix, and the BSDs, even OS/2's better-than-windows environment doesn't seem that useful or interesting to me. The architecture of a Linux system is far nicer to use, and so flexible and easily tailored, even without looking at any source code. And even the worst GCC and gnu stdlibc releases in all of history, were better and easier to use than the crap that came out of IBM.
So I'm nostalgic, but not really. It was good, but bits of it were rubbish. I enjoyed Rexx programming quite a bit, too, but Python is just so nice that I can't imagine writing scripts in anything like that ever again.
Delphi is still the one and only Visual RAD tool that I have ever found that was any good at all, and worth using. IBM Visual Age C++ and Visual Age Smalltalk are both dead and consigned to the scrap-heap of history, but they had this fascinating "building from parts" and "wiring up components" ideas that nothing, not even Delphi, has been able to equal for sheer coolness. Sad that coolness and proof-of-concepts were all it was really good for.